ymklein

I saw this film at the Montreal International Film Festival, where it has been well received. I have a feeling that it will not play as well inside the US, because it resolutely, disturbingly refuses to explain the behaviour of the teen-age killers, and also resolutely refuses to blame politics, economics, "society," or even the NRA (pace Michael Moore) for what appears to an act motivated by the fact of being sixteen. Van Sant's steadicam follows the principles (all non-professional actors) through the attractive, wide, clean halls of a large US high school, shooting them largely from behind. They walk, do normal things, greet one another, and are dead by lunch time. The killers spend the morning awaiting the delivery of the last item in their arsenal, playing Beethoven and a pared down video game, exchanging a kiss in the shower, and watching the Rise of Hitler on the History channel with half an eye. "Is that one Hitler?" one asks the other. "Yeah." The experience is hypnotic and perhaps the audience becomes as hypnotized as the young killers are by their own act. Whatever the source of the strength of this film, I find it hard to shake.

As was true of American Beauty, the press reviews were almost wholly laudatory. As was true of American Beauty, I found it hard to see what the fuss was about. This film is beautifully filmed, extremely stylish (probably a little too stylish -- the balletic slaughter toward the end is absurd) and utterly without content. What is this film about? That even if your father is a mass murderer (he does in maybe 26 folks in six weeks alone, let alone whom he might have killed previously) he's still your father? Oh. The film is clearly intended as some sort of morality play (it certainly isn't realistic gangster fare), but what's the moral? Law enforcement does not exist, not a single siren ever sounds, the violence takes place in a vacuum, barely observed by the larger society. What is all this? If violence is so encapsulated that it does not affect the larger society, who cares if these guys off each other? Where is Sam Pekinpaugh when you really need him?